Differences between a FFA page and a genuine link page
Submitting to FFA pages (free for all link pages) is waste of time! FFA pages generally exist only to harvest e-mail addresses and generate spam mail. If you do submit to such sites, be prepared to receive a lot of unwanted e-mail from the page owners.
How to spot the difference between a FFA page and a genuine link page? Before you place your link on any link page make sure that:
1.- Both the site that host the links and all the sites it links to should have similar themes/ topics as your own site (the search engines weight the value of a link less heavily if the linking site is not of a similar nature to yours - so why bother with any other kind of site?).
2.- Make sure the site is of good quality and links only to high quality sites (the search engines might lower your ranking for being "affiliated" with sites of low standard).
3.- Check that the link page is easily found and readily available for both search engine spiders and human visitors (what use is a link to your site if nobody ever sees it?).
Quality links like this will stay on the page for a long time and is actually seen by people that are genuinely interested in the topic in question. Just one good link can give you the same traffic as a major search engine, and it will increase your search engine rankings as well.